The Gold Sheet

THE PLAY: Clemson -1.0 (-110)

Pat Kelsey deserves a ton of credit for the turnaround that he has engineered in his first season at the helm in Louisville, but the Cardinals' schedule is impossible to ignore. Through absolutely no fault of their own, Louisville's schedule was incredibly front-loaded this season and the Cardinals have barely been tested since the calendar flipped to 2025. Louisville played Duke on December 8, then played North Carolina and Clemson in the first week of January. The Cardinals got all three of those teams at home and never had to travel to Durham, Chapel Hill or Clemson. They also didn't have to make the California road trip to face Cal or Stanford this season. Since Louisville beat Clemson on January 7, the Cardinals have played one team ranked inside KenPom's top-60 (SMU). The Tigers haven't exactly played a murderer's row of opponents either, but at least Clemson's schedule is a little more balanced. Over the last five weeks, the Tigers have played and beaten Duke, North Carolina and SMU (twice). Clemson's roster ranks No. 8 in the country in KenPom's experience metric. In Thursday's win over SMU, Clemson started four seniors and one junior. The Tigers have gone 7-2 against the spread in their last nine games. We're a broken record at this time of the year, but we'll go back to the well with one of our favorite angles: We want to play against teams that rely heavily on three-point shooting. Louisville was No. 12 in the country in three-point shot attempts this season, as nearly 49-percent of the Cardinals' shot attempts have come from beyond the arc. Shooting conditions at the Spectrum Center in Charlotte have not been kind to these players as the first 11 games have seen an average of 132.8 points per game and three-point shooting has been dreadful. Clemson shoots above the national average from two-point range, three-point range and the free throw line. When these teams met in Louisville in January, the Cardinals enjoyed a 20-5 edge in free throw attempts. With a better whistle in the rematch, we prefer the balanced attack from the experienced Tigers in this matchup.